Biography

Han Bing

Han Bing grew up in an impoverished village in rural China. After fifteen years of labor in the rural areas, in Beijing, he was moved by the harsh contrast between the urbanized “Chinese dream” propelling the nation’s struggle to become “modern”, and the cruel realities of those left behind, or trodden underfoot in this stampede. Exploring the struggles and desires of ordinary people in China’s “theater of modernization”, his works invert quotidian practice, reinvent everyday objects and ask us to rethink the order of things. Han Bing’s works are dedicated to Social Praxis of Art.

In Urban Amber, Han Bing’s visual interventions also raise questions about the paradoxes of desire. Desire for Han Bing is an irreducibly bifurcated modality, that is, it has powerful manifestations and effects that can be both beautiful and poisonous. In his conceptual photography series of single-exposure images, Urban Amber, this paradox takes on a different form. The spectre of glamorous high-rises, those icons of middle-class China’s dream of home and a better life, are juxtaposed to the rundown, temporary dwellings of the urban poor living in their shadows. These fantasy high-rises appear resplendent and dream-like until you realize that their inverted images are reflected in Beijing’s ubiquitous, industrial-waste and garbage-infested “stink rivers”. Like amber, these rivers capture sediment of the times, showing us through a mirror darkly, the underbelly of China’s fantasy of modernity.

9 Contemporary Art Exhibitions at Asian Art In London 2016

Art Radar

NOVEMBER 2016

Han Bing also works with multimedia projects, performance art, film and documentary, site-specific installations, painting and social art projects. He grew up in an impoverished village in rural China, and currently lives and works in Beijing. The artist has had influential solo shows at the Centre Pompidou, Columbia Museum of Art, National Art Museum of China and Guangzhou Art Museum among others.

Beyond Chinatown

AUGUST 2016

In Urban Amber, Han Bing’s visual interventions also raise questions about the paradoxes of desire. Desire for Han Bing is an irreducibly bifurcated modality, that is, it has powerful manifestations and effects that can be both beautiful and poisonous. In his conceptual photography series of single-exposure images, Urban Amber, this paradox takes on a different form. The spectre of glamorous high-rises, those icons of middle-class China’s dream of home and a better life, are juxtaposed to the rundown, temporary dwellings of the urban poor living in their shadows. These fantasy high-rises appear resplendent and dream-like until you realize that their inverted images are reflected in Beijing’s ubiquitous, industrial-waste and garbage-infested “/stink rivers”. Like amber, these rivers capture sediment of the times, showing us through a mirror darkly, the underbelly of China’s fantasy of modernity.

Rezul News

SEPTEMBER 2016

His solo show entitled Urban Amber is a series of roughly twenty photographs (c-prints on aluminum) and four transparency light box units, all of which were taken over the course of six years and will be on exhibit at FitzGerald Fine Arts gallery at Wooster Street in Manhattan with a dedicated evening reception on September 23rd.